Recently, due to such factors as retirement of the people of the baby-boom generation en masse, smaller numbers of children and aging of population in general, there is a fear of shortage in the labor power. There is thus an accelerated movement towards substituting a robot for part of the labor power. However, the current robot is not sufficient in its ability to recognize the environment, objects or speech, such that certain limitations are imposed on the sort of the operations that the robot can perform autonomously in homes or working places. It may thus be contemplated that a human being in a remote place operates the robot over a network, including the Internet. By such remote control of the robot, it may become possible for a robot to offer more intelligent variable services, not possible to date, such as understanding the user's speech to operate as instructed, doing a variety of operations in need of recognition of objects, or evading an obstacle in getting to the destination. In view of such concept, it may become a reality that a user of a robot recruits a person on the Internet who will operate the robot to carry out a job the user desires being done, and that the person who has applied operates the robot by remote operation to get some remunerative for his/her work.
In such remote operation of the robot, it becomes necessary that the image or the speech around the robot is transmitted to the person who operates the robot by remote control. However, if the site of use of the robot is a home or a working place, there are present objects or sounds that, the user does not desire being seen or heard by a third party. There may also be occasions where the user is not desirous that the person remote-operating the robot comprehends where or with whom the robot is operating. In short, in operating the robot by remote control, such a technique is needed that may deal successfully with the problem of privacy.
As a conventional technique that may deal successfully with the problem of privacy, Patent Document 1, for example, discloses a robot device including an imaging means for imaging the surrounding situation, a transmitting means for transmitting the image information, derived from an output of the imaging means, to an operating means, and a first alerting means. The first alerting means sends out a preset first alarm to outside in case the transmitting means is sending out the image information to the operating means. Patent Document 2 discloses a robot having a function of the visual sense. The robot includes a camera for capturing an image, a detection means for detecting the angle of the line of sight between the direction of the line of sight of a camera and a predetermined reference direction, and a field of view controlling means. The field of view controlling means controls the field of view of the robot, based on processing the image captured by the camera, in case the angle of the line of sight as detected by the camera exceeds a preset value.    Patent Document 1:    JP Patent Kokai Publication No. JP-P2002-331482A    Patent Document 2:    JP Patent Kokai Publication No. JP-P2003-291084A    Non-Patent Document 1:    Koichi Kise et al., ‘Current Status and Future Prospects of Camera-Based Character Recognition and Document Image Analysis’, IEICE Study Group of Pattern Recognition and Media Understanding, March 2005